The Brahmin and the Prostitute (Good Thoughts and Bad Thoughts) || AP Neem Candies
Acharya Prashant: If you have a thought and you do not favour it, support it, energise it, you do not turn it into action, then that thought gets weakened. It loses its power because it is not gaining any sympathy from you.
So, the thought is arising, and the thought is prompting you to act in a certain way, and you refuse to go by the demand of that thought. You refuse to act; you freeze the action. As the verse says, “You destroy the action”. You do not let the thought turn into action. The thought itself will die down, because the thought requires your support.
How do you express your support to the thought? By turning it into action. When you do not turn the thought into action, what have you told the thought?
“I do not respect you. You have come to me and you are saying that act this way, and I am not going by your advice. I do not respect you. I will not fuel you. I am not your ally.” And the thought, humiliated and de-energised, falls down.
Similar is the relationship between the latent tendency that gives rise to thoughts and thoughts.
Thought demands action, tendency demands thought. So, the tendency comes to you demanding that you think in a particular way. But if you do not support the tendency, if you do not let the tendency turn into active thoughts, then the tendency too will gradually shrivel. You are not energising the tendency—from where will it continue?
So, action is destroyed and that destroys thoughts, thought is destroyed and that destroys the tendency. And when false action, false thought, false tendencies are all gone then you are left with nothing but the Truth. This is the way in which you proceed from the gross to the subtle.
The questioner says, “I am aware that I have innate impulses like anger, greed, pride, fear and attachments. What is the process of dwindling of innate impulses as mentioned?” The process of dwindling of innate impulses is the process of not letting the impulses turn into thought or action.
How do you dwindle the innate impulses? By not letting them turn into thoughts, and then, actions.
That’s the highlighted portion.
How do you enfeeble a thought? By not acting on it. Let the thought keep coming, you keep disregarding it. When the thought will not find any traction with you, it will feel insulted and will retreat.
Let your impulses keep raging, do not let them occupy your mind. Do not start actively thinking on their lines, and then the impulses will gradually fall silent.
You have the choice. Nothing happens to you without your consent.
Impulses appeal to you, thoughts appeal to you, you are the judge. You decide whether to accept their appeals.
Do not say, “What do I do? I am a slave to my thoughts!” You are not a slave to your thoughts; you are the one who decides that you will go by your thoughts. And if you have decided, you can also reverse the decision. That power is there. Exercise that power judiciously.
Questioner: Sir, those thoughts can be good thoughts too?
Acharya Prashant: Do you ever have bad thoughts? If you know that a thought is bad, it will not remain anymore. According to the thinker, all thoughts are good. We said, thought requires your support to survive. So, if there is any thought that is surviving in you, according to you it is a…? Good thought. Otherwise how could it have survived?
Survival of thought requires that you consider it beneficial for yourself, right? If you know that a thought is not beneficial for you, then you will not support it, and then it cannot survive.
If a bad thought is preserving in your mind, continuing in your mind, then it means that you are just calling it a ‘bad thought’; deeply you are supporting it; deeply you think that it is a ‘good thought’.
Maybe for reasons of moral necessity you are superficially calling it ‘bad’, but deeply you are quite pleased with it. Had you really, honestly thought that the thought is ‘bad’, then the thought would have gone. But our minds are all full of so-called bad thoughts. What does that mean? We call them ‘bad’, but we actually do not consider them bad.
And your minds are not full of so-called ‘good thoughts’—what does that mean? It means that you call them ‘good’, but you consider them very-very bad. So even when those thoughts come to you, you do not support them. What do you support? All the so-called ‘bad thoughts’ because they are all quite nice, lovely, attractive.
Then let’s have little honesty. Why call them ‘bad’ at all?
There was this Bengali story…
A Bengali gentleman, Bhadralok, he was very fond of visiting brothels. And he was a Brahmin, the Brahmin that too of the highest gotra (clan). So, he will go to the prostitute and coil the sacred thread around his ear, do what he wanted to do and leave.
One day when he was leaving, the woman saw that he was exhausted: all in sweat and huffing and panting, he must have been quite intensely involved in the act. So, the woman brought a glass of water for him, he must have been a regular patron. So, for some client-relationship management she brought him some water. She said to him, “Sir, please take some water. You are sweating a lot. You are losing your breath.”
The bugger said to her, “I am a high-caste Brahmin, will I drink water from your hands?” The woman was a bad thought for him. Such are our ‘bad thoughts’. We enjoy them, and then we say, “Will I touch you? You low-class prostitute! Will I ever touch you? Will I ever accept water from your hands?”
That’s our relationship with our bad thoughts.
Full article link: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/honestly-watch-your-actions-and-youll-be-liberatedon-adhyatma-upanishad2019-1_03189c9
